The full title of this book is "Inside | Outside - From the Basics to the Practice of Design" and author Malcolm Grear should know a bit about his topic because apart from teaching design for years, in 1960, he established the highly respected design firm, Malcolm Grear Designers (MGD), known for its identity and print design work. Most notably, MGD was selected from 500 firms to design the "Look of the Games" for the 1996 Centennial Olympics in Atlanta, GA. Experience not to be sneezed at, as I'm sure you'll agree ... But back to the book at hand ...

From the opening words of the book ... "design must set a mood, generate tension, surprise, or calm; it can startle or seduce" ... you feel excited and ready to open your mind to Malcolm Grear and wallow in his design experience, because you want to be a designer like him and startle and seduce with your creations.

And, Mr Grear allows you to wallow and allows your creativeness to blossom as he sets his book out in a series of "student assignments" followed up by his Ten Steps and a whole host of other offings from his vast knowledge pool.

The book is not aimed at the web, it is aimed at graphic design. There are no hard and fast rules and the author asks his students to step outside their day to day boxes and transform every day items into pinnacles of design. He emphasizes that design is made up of hard work, persistance, enthusiasm and creativity.

All in all this book was a delightful journey for me and could possibly have been created to be a text for a design class at university. But it also contains some very good examples and explanations of MGD's own work for their clients, complete with explanations on how the design was derived.

If you have ever sat at a blank canvas and had to start any design work from scratch you will probably adore this book as much as I did. It also proved to me that design is hard, not something that can be done with the flick of a finger and thats something I've suspected for years now :)

The books get a definite thumbs up from me, I enjoyed it immensely.